A Grand Day Out – Thorough work from our tankers and team

Again we were out protecting our country’s motorways. The job was to clear a culvert of a build-up of embedded silt. The estimate was 30 tonnes of waste!

This was a large scale job involving a fantastic team and some of our flagship tankers. Our Super combination unit Rainmaker was there providing the hard core power for the operation. Our artic tanker which is nick named ‘Jack the giant slayer’ stored the waste that Rainmaker vacuumed. Another bulk tanker, our confined space team and a welfare unit made up the rest of the fleet.

Due to the nature of the waste, our team implemented a strategy of lowering the flow of water through the culvert to allow the confined space engineers into the space to shovel the shingle and silt into Rainmaker’s vacuum. They made a dam at the far end of the culvert and our combination unit was used to divert the remaining water flow from the culvert into a ditch beyond. It would naturally have flowed there from the culvert.

A 4” vacuum hose maintained the low water level allowing the confined space team access to the culvert. The larger 6” hose removed the large pieces of silt.

Our confined space engineers worked flat out to funnel the silt into the vacuum hose. You can see some of the silt is the size of golf balls. The vacuum hose sucked them away into our tankers.

These guys have no need of a gym! They are up for the hard graft.

Thankfully we have a welfare unit that we bring to these kinds of jobs. A warm kitchen, toilet and shower mean our engineers can have a short break on site and return to their work without much disruption. It saves driving covered in mud to the nearest greasy spoon for a cup of tea after shovelling mud for hours.

Good honest work was done! Preventative action against flooding was taken. Our work made the light at the end of the tunnel possible.